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points by Traster 8 hours ago | 0 comments

This is one of the things that makes me negative on AI. Before AI, no one would have done this. Because it's a huge amount of effort and a total waste of time. Now we have AI, we have this explosion in people going off and doing all these pointless activities.

What do we gain from a plethora of SPSS-alike tools? Nothing. There's literally no explanation on this page about why anyone who uses SPSS would want to use this. But it's "100% Safe Rust". Yes, that's a feature that someone who likes rust wants, not what someone who uses SPSS wants.

What do we lose by fracturing all academic statistical analysis into a dozen different tools instead of 1? Lots!

It's not even clear the person creating this even intends for anyone to use it. So (a) why are they doing it and (b) how do you even know if it actually works if absolutely no one is using it. In fact the danger now is someone who doesn't know the author is just an AI slop dilletante comes along looking for an SPSS-like tool and makes the mistake of trying to use it.

Is there really any difference between this and the people posting AI slop onto their reddit accounts. It's just raising the noise floor to the point where we're going to have to essentially shut down the public internet, everything of value will move to closed spaces.

[–] viraptor 7 hours ago

I'm extremely on the other side - it's not about what we gain, but what we don't lose. If there's even one person with a dataset they can't process easily without a proprietary tool, why shouldn't this exist?

I'm extremely happy every time a closed format falls. Whether it's this one, Sibelius music scores, records from medical devices, data series from scientific measurements, or something else. Every one of them stopped me from doing something in the past (not on a technical level but "it's not worth spending a month on this") and I'll support efforts like this.

[–] Traster 2 hours ago

If you want to advocate for open source alternative statistics software, sure, there are plenty of those - you can find half a dozen with a quick Google. None of them are prioritizing Rust Safeness, and they have a hell of a lot more support than "Here's something I vibe coded, I can't actually program so if you have a problem don't ask me"

[–] yjftsjthsd-h 2 hours ago

And are any of those drop in replacements that can handle the existing format

[–] hodgehog11 7 hours ago

Sorry, but this really comes across as demonstrating a substantial degree of entitlement. What is the purpose? Easy. A student is trained to use SPSS for their thesis work. They may be given a sitewise license from their university, but only for one device. Then after their training, they lose access to SPSS, but want to do that analysis in their workplace.

Proprietary software, especially at these prices, cause all kinds of issues. SPSS is one of the software packages that has a sizeable audience of people crying out for a true open source alternative. Just because you have the money to afford these things, does not mean that others do.

Also, if you are referring to the similarly named ArtCraft suite as a "pointless activity" then you are really out of touch.